Bought Subnautica this week - utterly amazing. Whilst it is underwater and not space, and a much smaller game map - you really could cry that Elite didn't follow this model. Easy to pick up, wonderfully crafted game world, able to walk around the submarine you can craft and every second playing feels worthwhile....even just watching the alien fish go about there business.

"The endgame for FD in terms of Elite development is finally abandoning the "season model" for Elite because they quite simply have no financial incentive to put anything more than minimal resources into the game at this point. They've realized that there isn't enough trust or goodwill left in the community to pay for content in advance, so they're going to do what they can with ridiculously overpriced cosmetic DLC and the occasional OP "feature" DLC that they hope will get more money out of existing players for as little effort as possible.

There is no "10 year plan" for Elite. There isn't even a "5 year plan". There was a 3 year plan, and we're reaching the end of it. They will keep their inexpensive BGS servers running, which require very little resources due to the game's P2P architecture, probably develop a few OP features and cosmetic DLC over the next few years, but we will not be seeing all of those impressive and immersive features that Braben told everyone about. It quite simply would not be financially viable for them to do so given their focus is on making money for their shareholders.

The really amusing part here is that I identified this problem last year after looking at FD's financial reports and seeing how they were neglecting Horizons and funneling revenue from Elite to develop Planet Coaster instead. I could clearly see where things were headed and now that even the most optimistic Elite players are finally arriving at the same conclusions there's very little FD can do to spin the situation.

"Came back after months away to find whole new bugs, menus slow as hell, surface scan mission bugged so that I was sat looking at an empty space where the outpost should have been for 5 minutes until it suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

"Just to say after a few days of average stability, the crashes are worse than ever today. All recommended changes done, but as it stands the game is close to unplayable. Nearly every interaction with the game causes a crash. FSD, landing, take off, Mission Board. Res. Combat. When it doesn't lose network connection, I get the blue screen error pop up once in a while too. Sadly, going to have to just give up on it as this isn't entertainment, it's painful. "
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/360065-PS4-Connection-to-transaction-server-error…

"Elite Dangerous is one of the most inexplicably horribly managed games I have ever seen in my life. Literally every single decision Frontier makes is incomprehensibly stupid and half-assed. I wish it were fun, believe me. But they actually managed to suck all the fun out of a game where you pilot a spaceship with the entire Milky Way galaxy at your fingertips."

ED's most famous player, CMDR Harry Potter, on the future of the game.

"As much as I would like to see this game still going in 10 years, I that is almost guaranteed not going to happen with the current rate of development...
Hell I can list just a few things that will prevent this game going for another 3 years never mind 10.

Little to no content
Minimal impact on the game world
Poor Crime and Punishment system
Some of the worst networking in gaming history
Poor developer attitudes towards exploits
Poor balance
Half baked features
Features riddled with bugs and not fixed
Story content cannot be completed in-game
No MMO social features
Bad AI
Grind on top of grind

This is just what I could think of right now and there are plenty more, again I would love to see this game continue since I enjoy it, but come on Fdev get your act together... you are missing critical features and have yet to address critical bugs. the space MMO scene is starting to ramp up and its looking great for us space fans. but right now I feel like I am in a sinking boat, hoping for another to pass by when I would prefer to stay in this boat afloat."
https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/6orb20/david_braben_hopes_elite_dangerous_keeps_going/dkkhkkq/

Frontier will now let you change the color of your lasers to white. For £1. Desperate, or what??

"one of the reasons I`m not ever supporting this company again

disingenuous marketing, over hyping, ever dreaming and completely disconnected from the reality of his own game CEO, high price, allays on-line DRM with very low quality servers, playing the "we so poor, we cannot give you what we advertised, give us money" card than buying a Hollywood franchise and a new building... Yeah that`s frontier for you.

"I purchased ED via PlayStation as a digital copy, I requested a refund which was initially refused. However, after explaining the situation further PlayStations agreed based on proof of correspondence with Frontier, which I have. I've given Frontier a deadline of 5th August as I feel this is ample time to fix or attempt to fix the issue.

As it stands for many PS4 ED players, the game isn't fit for purpose. I can't believe these issues have only just occurred without some form of testing being performed using a variety of Broadband providers, also in hindsight maybe Frontier should have allowed Beta testing for a week - The problem would've arisen and some folks may have waited for a fix to be provided be spending their hard earned cash.

The gaming industry appears to have this attitude where we, the consumer are bottomless money pits, where our views and concerns don't matter. Regular updates on this issue would be nice, given the amount of users impacted, I know Frontier can't give an answer right now but at least this might ease users frustrations - It's called good PR. "

"FDev were very cunning when they started Elite Dangerous - or they thought they were. They thought that they could not only outsource the QA process for the game. but they also thought they could also charge actual money, to have their own customers act as Quality Assurance staff.

A skeleton of a game is sold at full price, but advertised with the promise of constant improvement and development until it's fleshed out.

The developers don't tell you anything specific about these improvements, so you feel entitled to nothing, even though you paid for literally "anything".

Because of that, the developer is free to put your money in a new, completely different project.

They repeat steps 1-3 with the new project, be it a new game or something unrelated.
The old projects become frozen and stuck in development-hell (like Elite), just strong enough to sustain the requirements of being called a "WIP" while neither making the developers a profit nor financial losses (here's where microtransactions are used for balance).

To sustain this permanent cycle of cashflow none of the single projects must be "finished", no goal must be "achieved", but everything left unfinished by design.

"FDev is the wrong company for this game.
First they screwed up Arena by not having any incentive to play it except "fun", and had to cancel the 100k competition shortly after. Tried to compensate with Icarus Cup, obviously trying to rush it at first (with under a weeks notice originally!!!!) and having to delay it twice only to go _completely quiet_ (like with many other things) about it few months later. And then they apparently just gave up on it alienating 90% of the PvP community _for good_. My guess is they got tired or run out of resources trying to please both sides of the "griefer vs. carebear" fence and chose to run with the latter, larger group of players."
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/275595-Icarus-Cup-Information-and-Signup…

"Game unplayable
Crashes and kicks to menu with extreme regularity.
Accessing any part of the game causes kicks to main screen.
Excess frame rate drop the rest of the time and mileage and time eta's not showing correctly.
Have also experienced this all with the starter ship and the hauler. Landing at a station is nearly a guaranteed kick.
Crashes more regularly after selecting the launch option then accelerating away causes crashes.
"
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/360574-Random-disconnects

Frontier's response reflects the fact that the game is borked, they know it and they can't fix it.
"Hey Cmdrs,

"We took money for something, spent it on other stuff, failed to deliver quality content for the money we took and we know we can't pull the same stunt twice as most people aren't that stupid"

"I would say, without a shadow of a doubt that Horizons so far has not been value for money.

If you compare the quality and content of Horizons to something like The Witcher 3's Blood and Wine, an expansion that cost significantly less than Horizons and delivered so much more.
I'm not just talking by a bit, but a lot. It's got 10 times the content of Horizons (and that's conservative) at less than half the price.

The developer is roughly the same size as FD before anyone plays the "But FD is a small company" card.

In a vacuum I can see why some people would think Horizons was good value but compared to other games it's expansion has been pretty crappy value for money IMO

FD knew people wouldn't fall for the same trick twice and that's the reason they ditched that model, nothing else. There was no altruism in the choice to ditch that model it was "We took money for something, spent it on other stuff, failed to deliver quality content for the money we took and we know we can't pull the same stunt twice as most people aren't that stupid" .

"Story is the one thing in this game for which my interest has reached zero and has been keeping going down really. Unless you're part of the few people who somehow have inordinate amounts of free time to spend on plodding through ARG after ARG and staring at nothingness, reading Galnet and the occasional Twitter spam is really all there is.

Getting to see Thargoids? Apparently the way to do that was to check out the exact path some lucky dude was jumping; derping around the Pleiades sector for hours without luck? Yeah, turns out watching that stuff on Youtube is more fun. Barnacles? *yawn*. The most "gameplay" from the whole Thargoid "storyline" so far was the occasional UA bombing (one of the dumbest mechanisms in this game to date IMAO).

"there is no 10 year plan... and during/after KS we were constantly being told how the game would look at launch, and when they were talking about future after-release content like planetary landings, they were always clear about that (very clearly visible in the DDF posts for instance) so its more of "we are 3 years after launch and we still don`t have what was advertised to be at launch"

where is my orrery map? where is my procedural damage, where is my BGS as described by DB, where are my market analysis tools, where are my multiple station clusters....

"What hasn't been delivered that was promised with Horizons?
The moon,
landable planets with active volcanism including ice volcanism (don`t even start with the F`in fumaroles)
Cities
multiple SRV types
non-combat multicrew roles
new playable ships including very large trading ships...

"I have over 5,100 hours in Elite and one of the biggest lessons I have learned in that time is that FD doesn't fix bugs, they only make more. If they would just take a moment to polish up the quality of their product before moving ahead. Let's be honest here many updates that have came out have been so low quality at release (2.3: The Trainwreck in particular) that if it were an actual product you purchased in the store like a coffee maker you would have already returned it by throwing it angrily at the head of the store manager for selling you a coffee pot with no pot and no power cord because they forgot to give the thing a power switch at the factory. The "it's just a game argument" is a very silly one in this regard as it's still a business producing a product for consumers. Quality matters."
https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/6iiyz3/a_graphical_bug_in_elite_dangerous_first/dj705ko/

* Moves all the other ED people too on to some other game
* Ceases ED development
* Confesses to backers and players that they are never going to deliver the ED that they were paid for.
* Turns off the servers and released the code as Braben promised, so fans can have a go at fixing it up.
* Issue refunds.

for the love of fucking god, stop releasing your game completely bugged and especially if it affects major "quests". Every other game gets shit on for bullcrap like this, which is completely unacceptable in this day and age.

"This is the most honest video of Elite Dangerous I have come across. You're right. The developers have taken this game straight into the Free-to-Play zone. Everything happens by RNG, a pointless grind for money, to a pointless grind for ships you're going to have to RNG grind to RNG upgrade. Ya, they've really cheated us on gameplay. It's a Free-to-Play game model that's go sooo, sooo, much wasted potential. They just keep taking away from that potential every update.﻿"
https://www.youtube.com/watch…

"There is still nothing to do. After years. The biggest piece of content in the game is the Thargoid storyline and you don't even need to play to enjoy it.

I don't think I have ever even seen FDev address it either. It's been years if half baked content with no reason to play. Here's a list of things the game should have had indeed of wasting time on planet landing and multucrew:

player faction and corporations in game

play owned stations and housing

raid/dungeon style missions

Literally ANY type of progression besides just getting more money. Ships, ship kits, special paint jobs, special variations of existing ships that are only obtainable by doing special in game things

something that resembles a story mode. Either being a trucker or serving in the military

actual Co-op content and a reason to wing up with friends and take on missions together